Ponemon: Cost Of A Data Breach Rose To $3.5M In 2013

Companies lose an average of $145 per compromised record, according to annual "Cost of Data Breach Study."

The average cost of a data breach rose 15 percent last year to $3.5 million, according to a study published Monday.

The Ponemon Institute's ninth annual "Cost of Data Breach Study," which was sponsored by IBM, estimates that the average data breach across the globe costs victims about $145 per compromised record, 9 percent more than in 2012.

The most costly breaches occurred in the US and Germany at $201 and $195 per compromised record, respectively, the report says. The least expensive data breaches were in India and Brazil at $51 and $70.

Root causes of data breaches differ among countries. Countries in the Middle East and Germany had more data breaches caused by malicious or criminal attacks, Ponemon says. India had the most data breaches caused by a system glitch or business process failure. Human error was most often the cause in the UK and Brazil.

The most costly data breaches were those caused by malicious and criminal attacks, according to the report. The US and Germany paid the most for such attacks, at $246 and $215 per compromised record, respectively.

A strong security posture can help enterprises reduce the cost of a data breach, Ponemon says. On average, companies that self-reported they had a strong security posture also reported lower breach costs, reducing those costs by as much as $14 per record. The appointment of a chief security officer lowered the cost of a data breach by about $6 per record, the report says.

The greatest threats to the companies in the study are malicious code and sustained probes. Companies report an average of 17 malicious codes each month and 12 sustained probes each month, both up from 2012. Unauthorized access incidents are occurring at about the same pace as last year; companies report an average of 10 such incidents each month.

Tim Wilson is Editor in Chief and co-founder of Dark Reading.com, UBM Tech's online community for information security professionals. He is responsible for managing the site, assigning and editing content, and writing breaking news stories. Wilson has been recognized as one ... View Full Bio

This is a very interesting piece of article, thank you very much. I think data breach in deed varies from place to place and their causes must be different; if you look at India for instance, you will find out that data breach is caused mainly by system glitch; you may wonder why there is no much criminal attack in India as compared to Middle East. I think this is because, in Middle East there is a high rate of cyber crimes and has the highest numbers of sponsored hackers both foreign and domestic.

Consider that Middle East is historically a critical area, in this region the number of cyber threats is very high due to the persistent action of foreign state-sponsored hackers and cyber criminals. Typically APTs use malware-based attacks for this reason root cause in this area is malware.

The study states:

"As the findings reveal, the consolidated average per capita cost of data breach (compiled for ten countries and converted to US dollars) differs widely among the countries. Many of these cost differences can be attributed to the types of attacks and threats organizations face as well as the data protection regulations and laws in their respective countries."

The report is very interesting, data breach increase is an alarming phenomenon as evidenced also by the Verizon report issued weeks ago.

Within the huge amount of information present in the report me me highlight the interesting analysis conducted on the links between countries and root causes of the of data breaches, for example countries in Germany and in the Middle East had more data breaches caused by malicious or criminal attacks, meanwhile India had the most data breaches caused by a system glitch.

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